Judge Shuts Down Trump's Voter Database Plan

A federal judge has shut down a Trump administration plan to build a national voter database that would have pulled in Americans' Social Security numbers and citizenship information. In a 75-page ruling, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said federal officials "haphazardly combined and repurposed" sensitive data from multiple agencies to carry out Trump's March executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, the Hill reports. The order told the Social Security Administration to compile a "State Citizenship List" using its records, naturalization files, and a Homeland Security database, with the US Postal Service instructed to send mail ballots only to people on states' approved voter rolls

Sooknanan found the effort illegal, saying it violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act, and Administrative Procedure Act, and cited evidence that states using the data were wrongly dropping US citizens from voter rolls. She said the administration "flunked compliance" with the three acts with their use of "the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable," CBS News reports.

• "All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens," wrote Sooknanan, a Joe Biden appointee.

The decision, in a case brought by the League of Women Voters, effectively halts the database project. Advocacy group Democracy Forward called it a "critical win for voting rights," saying it "protects millions from baseless investigations and unlawful voter roll purges." The "data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO. The decision can be appealed to DC's federal appeals court, CBS reports.